teaching, math, teaching math

MTBoS

This is my MTBoS starter kit. What is the MTBoS? Well, it stands for MathTwitterBlogOSphere, but it’s not an official entity or anything. It’s just a label that’s thrown around for math teachers and others in the math ed community who talk, share resources and build community on the internet. It’s not centrally organized, no one is in charge, and you don’t have to pay to join. Just teachers who like helping other teachers be a little better at their jobs. There’s also no pressure to contribute. If you’d just like to sit back, watch, and learn what you can, do it. Here are some avenues that might help you:

Blogs:This is not comprehensive, and totally subjective, but here are a few of my favorite blog posts, and some active bloggers that I think are worth following. Want to start your own blog? Here are some ideas. To get some tips for searching through blogs, check out the Explore MTBoS page as well. Many people use Feedly to organize blogs and sift through all the good stuff.

Twitter:
There’s always conversation happening on Twitter. It’s intimidating at first, but math folks on Twitter are incredibly welcoming. My advice is: get an account, follow Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) and follow every math person Twitter recommends for you after you follow Dan. That will get you a selection of the most active and interesting people, and you can go from there to refine who is most interesting. If you tweet with #MTBoS, people will most likely talk to you and answer your questions. And in general, feel free to say hello if someone says something interesting — we all love to talk about math, that’s why we’re on Twitter!
Here are some tips from Explore MTBoS and some advice on Twitter from Michael Fenton.

ResourcesThere are some incredible people in the world who have collected and organized huge amounts of incredible resources to help teachers. Explore MTBoS has some great links as well. If all you want to do is get some ideas for things to do in your classroom, check these out: